I've been umming and arring about whether to post this, but there is another shopper that has been posted about and it went down quite well. This is a bike I've built almost completely from scratch to fit me and suit the short journey from the station to work. First up is a picture of what it looks like now and below is how I built it.

It started life as a Universal folding shopper of unknown age. I got it on eBay specifically to chop up into a rat cruiser and I was looking for certain components to be present like the crusty whitewalls, rack, white saddle, white handlebars and general tattiness. Paid way too much for it but this is the original bike:

That became this...

...which I bumbled around on for a number of years and it became my festival bike. It went to Le Mans with me a couple of times, it was stolen in France and I found it about a week later, dumped, and it's been all over the place with me since. However, it has been stashed in the garage unused for some time just taking up space. I decided to turn it back into a more conventional bike for a fun hack between the station and work.

Back in September then, it became this:

Most of that bar the wheels went in the bin and the rest got chopped up leaving me with these two bits:

I ground off the old welds, made up some new tubes, a careful bit of measurement and clamping and tacked it together for a quick look:

That'll do!

Finish welded it and stripped it all naked:

Then made a makeshift "spraybooth" on the floor :

And a bit of paint drying, bearing repacking and spannering later, voila:

I had some old white pedals somewhere but I lost them almost immediately after I'd found them, so I borrowed the MKS pedals off my Viscount. The saddle is a white leather eBay cheapy but turns out to be dead comfy on this bike.

It got a bit of a beating at Critical Mass. First the brake cable broke and I nearly ended up crashing (the dangers of one brake ), then the crank worked loose and mashed up the axle in the bottom bracket.

It's got a very soft axle in the Thompson style bottom bracket and the cotter pins have a habit of working loose. I had to cycle it quite some distance to get home and it's mangled it up a bit. I've tried shimming the cotter pins and everything but it's basically worn past the point of no return.

Last night I fixed it back up with a few modifications/improvements. New brake cable for a start. I lost the little ferrule thing for the cable, so I modified a vintage Stomberg 94 carburettor jet to fit. I shamfered the axle and inside of the crank with the mind to welding it on, but I had the idea of putting the cotter pin in round the wrong way and really hammering it in. Seems to have worked, but it's ready to weld if I need to. The main mod though is I've taken off the 18-tooth freewheel and replaced it with a 13 tooth fixed cog, so now it has some sensible gearing and it's a fixie as I orginally wanted it!

Glad to see there are some folks out there with some love for the humble Shopper. I have a lovely bronze colour frame and forks were part of a complete I pulled from a skip. The wheels were pretty much gone, but I think I kept the 3 speed hub, stem, bars & seat post too. Anyways I am attempting to rationalise my workshop - so if anyone out there thinks they want to build up a lovely shopper they can have it - uplift it for free - or I'll send it for the cost of postage, lets say £20.

That's really cracking. The new shopper looks so factory - you'd never guess it's had a whole previous life.

I saw one of the Viscount versions - the Delta - off Oxford Street in London on Saturday; the first time I've ever seen one in the flesh. And then spent ten minutes thinking about was I could explain returning from London with another bike to our lass... Thankfully sanity prevailed, I didn't try and talk the owner into selling and our lass is still talking to me

It's pretty good. I borrowed a Brompton a few months ago on a try-before-you-buy scheme to see what it was like and while I loved the way it folded it was a pig of a bike to ride. The steering was squirrelly and the bike was basically unstable. At any kind of speed I was scared to take a hand off the handlebars to signal or whatever. So how did they get it so wrong? This is a bike I built in my garage and I can ride it with no hands quite happily. The same goes for my RSW which has 16" wheels like the Brompton.

I'm tempted to put the rack back on it so I can sling my shopping on when I go out of a lunctime

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